Hi, I'm Folke; the face and muddy hands behind Dreizehn Einhalb Gramm.

It started with a La Pavoni hand-lever espresso machine, a Christmas gift from my parents. I spent weeks on the grind, the water temperature, the pressure in search of the perfect shot. The number that came out the other end was 13.5 grammes of coffee for a single espresso.

That precision felt like everything I believed in: detail, optimisation, the idea that the right answer could be engineered. Dreizehn Einhalb Gramm started as a symbol of that pursuit. And once the espresso was right, the next question was already on the table: what would I drink it from.

In early 2022 I bought a potter’s wheel. With an architecture background and some prior experience with clay, I thought I could simply design the right cup for the espresso.

Clay is not as obedient as numbers. Unlike espresso, there is no fixed formula for shaping it. Small variations change everything, and imperfections appear whether you invite them or not. The details you can’t fully control are the ones that give a piece its character. Slowly, that became the more interesting question.

Handmade objects work as a counterweight to mass production. A few years ago, ceramics started finding a much wider audience. People are looking for more meaning in the things they touch every day.

Craftsmanship has become a loaded word, and how well something is made depends on who you ask. For me, what matters more is how much of the person ended up in the thing. That’s the part I keep coming back to.

I started Dreizehn Einhalb Gramm to make objects that invite use. Cups, bowls, and plates that become part of everyday routines; washed, chipped, repaired, kept. A cup on a shelf tells you one story. A cup in use tells another. It shows whether the rim sits right on the lip, whether the weight balances when full, whether the glaze holds up over years of use. Use is still the most honest test I know.

Buying handmade is a different transaction. With an industrial cup, you buy a shape that exists in the thousands; nobody decided anything about your one. With a handmade cup, a person sits behind the object: someone weighed this exact lump of clay, pulled its wall on the wheel, judged its curve, and at some point decided it was finished. That attention stays in the piece, and it changes how the object behaves in the hand; over time, it changes how the object is treated.